A Dizzy Business

January 29, 2010

Doris

Posted by Nanette under Uncategorized | Tags: age, intelligence, the real world |
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My neighbour, Doris, is around 80 years old. We meet each other on the landing from time to time as I’m letting the cat out or bringing her in, and each time we start out having the same conversation. She asks what my cat’s name is, what my name is, introduces herself as Doris and says it’s nice to meet me finally. Then we move on to other subjects. Once she asked me about the other girl I live with (there isn’t one), and another time she told me about her earlier life managing a general store in Fiji. She adores my cat, and the cat seems to hate Doris a lot less than she does most people (though that still doesn’t mean she likes her).

Tonight I stepped out to call the cat in, and met Doris on the landing. She’d poured my cat a saucer of milk and walked all the way down to the bottom of the stairs to give it to her, splashing it on the steps. Since the cat had run away and left the milk behind, I went down and fetched Doris’ saucer for her and we had our usual conversation. As she introduced herself again, I noticed that she seemed far sicker than usual. She has never been well, but tonight she was different in a way I couldn’t put my finger on – vaguer in her speech, shakier in her movements. Instinct – I don’t know what else to call it – tells me she does not have long.

The conversation kept circling back, as it always does, to my cat. Doris is very fond of her, though I can never tell how much either of them remembers of their last meeting. For a moment I thought she had tears in her eyes as she exclaimed:

“Isn’t it wonderful how clever they are? They know when they’re thirsty, they know when they’re hungry…!”

While we chatted around in circles I amused myself by wondering if my poor, wandering neighbour had just proposed a new definition of intelligence: if a thing knows what it wants, it’s clever. That would rule some plants in, and some humans out. A radical new ethical system is born!

It stopped being funny when I realised that soon, Doris herself may not know whether she is thirsty or hungry.

January 26, 2010

Hero

Posted by Nanette under Uncategorized | Tags: abortion, feminism, human rights, medicine, misogyny |
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Warren Hern is heroic.

He’s the last late-term abortionist in the USA (the second-to-last, George Tiller, was murdered last year). He is 70, and when he retires, or is killed, there will be nobody left to help women whose pregnancies have gone horribly wrong. They’ll either have to leave the country in search of a doctor, or risk their lives giving birth to non-viable babies. Some will die. Most of the babies will too.

It’s unlikely that another doctor will come forward to take Dr Hern’s place. The work is unpleasant and the threats and abuse are constant. Yet as this article by John H. Richardson makes clear, he passionately believes in the importance of what he does and refuses to back down.

The last abortionist by John H. Richardson

January 25, 2010

(Don’t) Marry Him

Posted by Nanette under Uncategorized | Tags: books, feminism, marriage, misogyny |
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This week in antifeminist publishing:

Women told to stop looking for Mr Right

A new book (shortly to be made into a movie, hooray) is advising women to give up on love and settle for whoever will take them. According to author Lori Gottlieb, being unmarried is a tragedy and no woman in her right mind would choose it, so we should grab any guy that’s going and hang on for dear life.

Gottlieb blames feminism for the number of women who find themselves alone after spending years holding out for their white knight. To the outside world, says Gottlieb, these women still insist they are self-sufficient. “But in reality, we aren’t fish who can do without a bicycle; we’re women who want a traditional family,” she writes. “Every woman I know – no matter how successful and ambitious, how financially and emotionally secure – feels panic, occasionally coupled with desperation, if she hits 30 and finds herself unmarried.”

Ahem.

Feminism gets blamed for a lot of things, but what they all boil down to is this: modern women have choices where our grandmothers did not, and some people find that terrifying. In the case of marriage, we can choose to hold out for true love and hope for the best, or we can choose to marry the first guy who offers for fear of ending up alone. In the good old pre-feminist days which Gottlieb would like to return to, women didn’t have much choice about entering into mediocre marriages. They had to get married – it was an economic and social necessity. Feminism gave us the vote, the Pill and (theoretically) equal pay. It deserves credit for the fact that my generation can opt out of a mediocre marriage – not blame.

It’s hard to believe this has to be said, but women are not all the same. We do not all want the same things. We do not all have the same fears, the same desires. Women, like men, are all different people. Some are crazy about marriage and babies. Others could not care less. Some hate being single, while others love it.

Anybody who wrote a book claiming that every straight man wants the exact same thing out of life – and that he’s lying or deluded if he claims otherwise – would be laughed out of the publishers office. Write it about women and you’ve got yourself a book-and-movie deal.

January 11, 2010

Lost in Cambodia

Posted by Nanette under Uncategorized | Tags: Cambodia, creationism, denial, ideology, pseudo-academics, writers |
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…And on the subject of Cambodia, below is a link to an article (much, much better than mine) on the bizarre death of Scottish Pol Pot apologist Malcolm Caldwell:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jan/10/malcolm-caldwell-pol-pot-murder

For all I know Caldwell may have been brilliant, but on the subject of Cambodia he was the worst kind of pseudo-academic. When presented with a mountain of evidence pointing one way, and next to no evidence pointing the other, he chose to go the no-evidence route for purely ideological reasons. See also: Holocaust denial, creationism, anti-vaccinationists.

Ultimately, all that made him unusual was that he paid for it.

January 11, 2010

Proud moment

Posted by Nanette under Uncategorized | Tags: Cambodia, I made this myself, writers |
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My brain and I didn’t get an awful lot done in 2009 – for much of the year it was busy throwing tantrums while I fed it booze to calm it down. But toward the end I did succeed in selling an article to the wonderful New Internationalist:

http://www.newint.org/features/special/2009/11/26/year-thirty/

This writing thing rarely feels worthwhile, but seeing my article go up was one of those moments where it seems right. I kissed the cheque when it arrived.

January 10, 2010

Consider the Lobster

Posted by Nanette under Uncategorized | Tags: animal rights, big ideas, books, vegetarianism, writers |
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I read my first essay by David Foster Wallace the other day and, inevitably, fell for his amazing style and intelligence. If you only ever read one piece by Wallace (unlikely), make it Consider the Lobster, a piece he wrote for Gourmet magazine in 2004. It starts off as a travelogue before warping into a sort of philisophical exploration of meat eating. Even the footnotes are head-spinning:

¹⁴ Is it significant that “lobster,” “fish,” and “chicken” are our culture’s words for both the animal and the meat, whereas most mammals seem to require euphemisms like “beef” and “pork” that help us separate the meat we eat from the living creature the meat once was? Is this evidence that some kind of deep unease about eating higher animals is endemic enough to show up in English usage, but that the unease diminishes as we move out of the mammalian order? (And is “lamb”/“lamb” the counterexample that sinks the whole theory, or are there special, biblico-historical reasons for that equivalence?)

January 10, 2010

Resolution

Posted by Nanette under Uncategorized | Tags: big ideas, books, feminism, home, howl, theory, writers |
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I made my annual visit home over the Christmas holidays, and stayed in my old room at my parent’s house. There aren’t many of my old belongings left in there now, six years after I left the country, but I still have an full bookshelf which is literally buckling under the weight of all the novels and textbooks on it. Each year I pick as many books from the old shelf as I can fit into my suitcase and take them with me – at this rate I should have all of my books in the one house within about ten years.

Shortly after arriving at my parent’s house this time around I was looking over the contents of that health-and-safety hazard of a bookshelf, when something struck me:

I’ve lost my mind.

Not in the sense that I was no longer sane, but in the sense that I was no longer thinking. Post grad-school, my mind had grown flabby and weak, obsessed with workday dramas and dreary relationship problems to the detriment of everything else. The evidence of mental decline was right there on the collapsing shelf – sharing a row with several dull-but-important critical theory texts and two classic works on feminism was the only recently-purchased book on the entire shelf: a copy of He’s Just Not That Into You.

I want my mind back.

So I made it my New Year’s resolution to re-engage with the world of big ideas, to think and to challenge myself and anybody else I can convince to listen for a minute. This blog is a part of that effort, and I’ll be using it to publish my own work, to link to articles and essays by far better writers than myself, and occasionally to howl impotently at the world.